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Title: Boston Confucianism: Portable Tradition in the Late-Modern World (Suny Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture) by Robert Cummings Neville, Tu Weiming ISBN: 0-7914-4718-9 Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr Pub. Date: November, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95

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Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Very thoughtful book
Comment: The author believes that Confucianism is pertinent today. He presents Confucianism by themes instead of by Confucian teachers, like Philip Ivanhoe in his "Confucian Moral Self Cultivation." It is an erudite book with many references that I have found helpful in my study of Confuciansim. I've purchased and studied some of the books he used as references and have found them helpful. I found Chapter 7, "Motifs of being", and Chapter 9, "Resources for a conception of selfhood," particularly thoughtful. You should be warned that the author is a college professor and writes like one. I highly recommend this book if you want to consider Confucianism as a living system and not just an historical study.

Rating: 4
Summary: Can you be a Christian and a Confucian?
Comment: The author is attempting to define a form of Confucianism for non-Chinese. One of the main problems is translating the Confucian notion of ritual/etiquette into Western ideas. Neville relies on Fingarette's study, "Confucius The Secular as Sacred" to do this: basically by using a much wider concept of ritual, referring to all the *signs* in our relationships: signs of friendship, love, commitment... it goes beyond courtesy, to a definition of roles in relationships, although these can be very flexible.
Next Neville, who is a Christian, attempts to reconcile Confucianism and Christianity, and to do this he looks for some form of transcendence (an absolute beyond the perceptible phenomena) in Confucianism to match the transcendent Christian God: Hall & Ames have shown that such a transcendence does not exist in early Confucianism and I don't think that Neville succeeds in proving that they are wrong. He does point though to the Neo-Confucian concept of "principle" that is transcendent since it structures all things and man. This then could be a bridge towards Christianity.
Well the great thinkers (Neville, Hall & Ames) have given us a green light: we can be Western Confucians!
Thomas

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